I see the light and it's made of lasers!

Book: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Authors: Lots (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)

Published: 1994 (collection; Tor)

Pages: 988

Holy shit was this book ever difficult to get through, guys.

Let me clarify right now that I don’t mean because of the quality; it was purely a size thing. Almost 1000 pages crammed with tiny type about physics and biogenetics and astronomy and advanced mathematics and, weirdly enough, more than one whirlpool. Plus dragons.

I’ve been chipping away at this collection since the beginning of July, and it really helped to take two, several-smaller-books-sized breaks. Even then, finishing it still gives my brain that way-too-full sensation of going to a museum and reading every single plaque next to every single exhibit. Ow.

And that is what this gi-fucking-normous book functions best as: a very complete history of sci fi. (Well, up to a point. The youngest story in here is older than I am.) I read it because I want to learn more about the genre, and it gave a really thorough tour through a lot of different trope origins, teaching by showing off examples. Which was the best way to learn, because here you get all the lasers and moon colonies where people have already gotten cynical about the wonders of space and deep-sea aliens and sentient monkeys who escape wearing orange Bermuda shorts and carrying their typewriters and children’s games that lead into another dimension and Asimov computers compiling information about life’s biggest question until the end of time.

It’s all blended together, in case you can’t tell. I think partly because I read all the intros to the stories, too, which each boiled down to “This guy is awesome and [chose one] severely under-appreciated” OR “recognized as one of the leading writers of the genre and a bunch of people still copy him.”

(Regarding that last adjective, there are a relatively decent number of female authors represented here, which is to say two more beyond Anne McCaffery [dragons!] and Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection was also co-edited and compiled by a lady.)

I thought the one they chose for Poe was weaksauce because it’s a sailor describing how he got out of a whirlpool, which, while still affecting, was the most conventional Poe story I’ve ever read. Also, maybe I’m just not appreciating historical nuance, but H.G. Wells’s “Hey, Tanks!” (actual title: “The Land Ironclads”) was also not nearly as good a representation of that author as they could’ve picked. And I can’t really get over McCaffery’s dragons getting put into a collection dedicated to hard sci fi when the definition of the subgenre specifically eliminates magic as a reason for anything.

But once I got into the rhythm and let my eyes skim the passages with incomprehensible engineering equations in them, I had a great time. I’m struggling with the decision about what to do with this physical book now, though. To the pros and cons list!

It throws my spine out of whack whenever I try to lug it around in my shoulder bag, and I automatically deduct major points from any reading material I can’t carry with me at all times.

As a city girl whose pedestrian ways has grown a healthy wariness of potential muggers, I appreciate having a blunt object that will stun but not kill and look completely innocent while doing so.

I can’t see myself ever plowing through the whole thing again, like, ever.

But it’d be great to have to spot-check and keep as a future readings list for authors I would never come across again.

Oh, hell, I’ll just keep the damn thing so I’ll have an excuse to either weed my crowded fiction bookshelf or build another one that looks like the TARDIS. 

End of the world, Stephen King style

Book: The Stand (Complete and Uncut Edition)

Author: Stephen King

Published: 1991 (Signet)

Pages: 1141

You can gauge my stress level fairly accurately by the size of the Stephen King book I reach for to read yet again. This one is epic.

 It’s about a superflu epidemic that kills almost everyone in the world, and how the few who survive find each other and divide into good and evil camps depending on which shared supernatural dream pulls them harder.

I’ve reread it enough to sort of transcend the plot and focus on the underpinning of the story and how King scaffolds such a giant piece of writing. It surprises me how well he does, especially when I see that ominous subtitle “The Complete and Uncut Edition.” The 1991 version is the only one I know, which might be why I can’t tell where he’s added stuff. None of it reads as clumsily grafted on, although there are the usual bursts of overly witty banter and slightly stilted pop culture references that don’t add much except to the permissions granted list in the front.

 About the good and evil: in this book, it’s explicitly a Christian battle, which I don’t have a problem with because it’s a good shorthand that means King doesn’t have to go super deep into explaining it and is free to instead explore details. But his Good People are awfully Good for no grounded reasons other than “Well, it’s the RIGHT thing to do.” The only one who spells out why it’s an even more terrible sin to murder now—because people are far more precious—is the lady who is drawn the strongest to the Dark Man because he wants her to bear his son so she goes to the evil side anyway.

The people on the bad side are just so much more interesting than the Good People. The Bad People have more complex motivations and darker instincts they don’t suppress, or else they give into them after torturous inner turmoil. To be fair, most of the Good People have their share of inner turmoil too, it’s just directed at overcoming personal traits that seem like relatively small potatoes when stacked against the new fate of the human race. Still fun to read, though, and the end is an excellent mixture of creepy undertones that suggest the surface optimism will not end up justified.

It’s a good thick slab of Uncle Stevie’s Story Time, a long one-way conversation for when I want to stay the hell out of my own headspace for awhile.